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107Can the skepticism debate be resolved?Synthese 168 (1). 2009.External world skeptics are typically opposed to admitting as evidence anything that goes beyond the purely phenomenal, and equally typically, they disown the use of rules of inference that might enable one to move from premises about the phenomenal alone to a conclusion about the external world. This seems to bar any a posteriori resolution of the skepticism debate. This paper argues that the situation is not quite so hopeless, and that an a posteriori resolution of the debate becomes possible …Read more
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105Bootstrap Confirmation Made QuantitativeSynthese 149 (1): 97-132. 2006.Glymour’s theory of bootstrap confirmation is a purely qualitative account of confirmation; it allows us to say that the evidence confirms a given theory, but not that it confirms the theory to a certain degree. The present paper extends Glymour’s theory to a quantitative account and investigates the resulting theory in some detail. It also considers the question how bootstrap confirmation relates to justification.
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177A new solution to the paradoxes of rational acceptabilityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (3): 391-410. 2002.The Lottery Paradox and the Preface Paradox both involve the thesis that high probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The standard solution to these paradoxes denies that rational acceptability is deductively closed. This solution has a number of untoward consequences. The present paper suggests that a better solution to the paradoxes is to replace the thesis that high probability suffices for rational acceptability with a somewhat stricter thesis. This avoids the untoward conseque…Read more
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522Generalizing the lottery paradoxBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (4): 755-779. 2006.This paper is concerned with formal solutions to the lottery paradox on which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. It considers some recently proposed solutions of this type and presents an argument showing that these solutions are trivial in that they boil down to the claim that perfect probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The argument is then generalized, showing that a broad class of similar solutions faces the same problem. An argument against some formal solutio…Read more
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150Extending the Hegselmann–Krause Model III: From Single Beliefs to Complex Belief StatesEpisteme 6 (2): 145-163. 2009.In recent years, various computational models have been developed for studying the dynamics of belief formation in a population of epistemically interacting agents that try to determine the numerical value of a given parameter. Whereas in those models, agents’ belief states consist of single numerical beliefs, the present paper describes a model that equips agents with richer belief states containing many beliefs that, moreover, are logically interconnected. Correspondingly, the truth the agents…Read more
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18Two accounts of similarity comparedIn Hieke Alexander & Leitgeb Hannes (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos Verlag. pp. 387--389. 2009.
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82Decision theory and the rationality of further deliberationEconomics and Philosophy 18 (2): 303-328. 2002.Bayesian decision theory operates under the fiction that in any decision-making situation the agent is simply given the options from which he is to choose. It thereby sets aside some characteristics of the decision-making situation that are pre-analytically of vital concern to the verdict on the agent's eventual decision. In this paper it is shown that and how these characteristics can be accommodated within a still recognizably Bayesian account of rational agency.
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Conceptual Spaces as Philosophers’ ToolsIn Peter Gärdenfors & Frank Zenker (eds.), Applications of Conceptual Spaces : the Case for Geometric Knowledge Representation, Springer Verlag. pp. 207-221. 2015.
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149A Pragmatic Dissolution of Harman’s ParadoxPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 326-345. 2007.There is widespread agreement that we cannot know of a lottery ticket we own that it is a loser prior to the drawing of the lottery. At the same time we appear to have knowledge of events that will occur only if our ticket is a loser. Supposing any plausible closure principle for knowledge, the foregoing seems to yield a paradox. Appealing to some broadly Gricean insights, the present paper argues that this paradox is apparent only.
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164Assertion, Moore, and BayesPhilosophical Studies 144 (3): 361-375. 2009.It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. As an interesting aside, it wi…Read more
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Grondslagen en toepassingen van de formele epistemologieAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 101 (4): 237-244. 2009.
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275A contextualist solution to the Gettier problemGrazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1): 207-228. 2005.According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, pace virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person h…Read more
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Empiricist Semantics and Indeterminism of ReferencePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 70 171-188. 2000.
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100Can the World Help Us in Fixing the Reference of Natural Kind Terms?Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 29 (1). 1998.According to Putnam the reference of natural kind terms is fixed by the world, at least partly; whether two things belong to the same kind depends on whether they obey the same objective laws. We show that Putnam's criterion of substance identity only "works" if we read "objective laws" as "OBJECTIVE LAWS". Moreover, at least some of the laws of some of the special sciences have to be included. But what we consider to be good special sciences and what not depends upon our values. Hence, "objecti…Read more
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23Basic Beliefs, Coherence, and Bootstrap ConfirmationIn Rene van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge, Ontos-verlag. pp. 4--57. 2005.
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18A Paradox for EmpiricismPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 1996.According to van Fraassen, constructive empiricism yields a better account of science than does scientific realism. One particularly important advantage van Fraassen claims his position to have over scientific realism is that the former can make sense of science without invoking pre-Kantian metaphysics. In the present paper the consistency of van Fraassen's position is put in doubt. Specifically, it will be argued that van Fraassen faces the paradox that he cannot do with nor without the pre-Kan…Read more
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14Empirische toetsing Van inductieve logica'sTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (4). 2000.Inductive logics purport to specify, for any given hypothesis and any given evidence statement, whether and, if so, to what extent the evidence statement should bear on our confidence that the hypothesis is true. If we agree that there can only be one true answer to questions of this sort, then the project of inductive logic faces a serious difficulty, namely that the many different systems that have been proposed in the literature rarely reach an unanimous verdict. In this paper I investigate t…Read more
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434Ramsey’s test, adams’ thesis, and left-nested conditionalsReview of Symbolic Logic 3 (3): 467-484. 2010.Adams famously suggested that the acceptability of any indicative conditional whose antecedent and consequent are both factive sentences amounts to the subjective conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. The received view has it that this thesis offers an adequate partial explication of Ramsey’s test, which characterizes graded acceptability for conditionals in terms of hypothetical updates on the antecedent. Some results in van Fraassen may raise hope that this explicator…Read more
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303Empirical equivalence, explanatory force, and the inference to the best theoryPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1): 281-309. 2005.In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.
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Conceptuele schema's en convergentie: Putnams intern realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 86 (2): 111-127. 1994.
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36A role for normativismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 252-253. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) argue against prescriptive normativism and in favor of descriptivism. I challenge the assumption, implicit in their article, that there is a choice to be made between the two approaches. While descriptivism may be the right approach for some questions, others call for a normativist approach. To illustrate the point, I briefly discuss two questions of the latter sort
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158A Puzzle About Stalnaker’s HypothesisTopoi 30 (1): 31-37. 2011.According to Stalnaker’s Hypothesis, the probability of an indicative conditional, $\Pr(\varphi \rightarrow \psi),$ equals the probability of the consequent conditional on its antecedent, $\Pr(\psi | \varphi)$ . While the hypothesis is generally taken to have been conclusively refuted by Lewis’ and others’ triviality arguments, its descriptive adequacy has been confirmed in many experimental studies. In this paper, we consider some possible ways of resolving the apparent tension between the anal…Read more
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83How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionalsSynthese 194 (5). 2017.Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts
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350Similarity After GoodmanReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 61-75. 2011.In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of sim…Read more
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207Earman on underdetermination and empirical indistinguishabilityErkenntnis 49 (3): 303-320. 1998.Earman (1993) distinguishes three notions of empirical indistinguishability and offers a rigorous framework to investigate how each of these notions relates to the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. He uses some of the results obtained in this framework to argue for a version of scientific anti- realism. In the present paper we first criticize Earman's arguments for that position. Secondly, we propose and motivate a modification of Earman's framework and establish several results co…Read more
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193Evidence, Explanation, and the Empirical Status of Scientific RealismErkenntnis 63 (2): 253-291. 2005.There is good reason to believe that, if it can be decided at all, the realism debate must be decided on a posteriori grounds. But at least prima facie the prospects for an a posteriori resolution of the debate seem bleak, given that realists and antirealists disagree over two of the most fundamental questions pertaining to any kind of empirical research, to wit, what the range of accessible evidence is and what the methodological status of explanatory considerations is. The present paper aims t…Read more
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